Polymeric Antimicrobial Peptide Mimics against Biofilms

Programme overview:
This MRC-funded doctoral training partnership (DTP) brings together cutting-edge molecular and analytical sciences with innovative computational approaches in data analysis to enable students to address hypothesis-led biomedical research questions. This is a 4-year programme whose first year involves a series of taught modules and two laboratory-based research projects that lead to an MSc in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research. The first two terms consist of a selection of taught modules that allow students to gain a solid grounding in multidisciplinary science. Students also attend a series of masterclasses led by academic and industry experts in areas of molecular, cellular and tissue dynamics, microbiology and infection, applied biomedical technologies and artificial intelligence and data science. During the third and summer terms students conduct two eleven-week research projects in labs of their choice.

Project:
Biofilm are considered a physiological three-dimensional microbial community embedded in a polymeric matrix, which protects the bacterial community against the environment including the antibiotic treatment. In the becoming antimicrobial era, the biofilm infection in chronic wounds, ulcers, prosthetic joints, or in organs as heart or lungs are an increasingly concern for public health and has a huge economic impact. Recently, it has been shown that cationic polymers (polymers with a positive charge) mimicking antimicrobial peptides are potential new candidates in antibiotics development. The project is truly multidisciplinary, involving chemistry, materials science and microbiology, including polymer chemistry, to synthesise multiple architectures of cationic polymers mimicking antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and microbiology to study their mode of action against biofilms. The project will address both fundamental and applied questions: understanding biofilm communities formation and how to use polymers to either destroy the matrix, or as new actives against microorganism living inside the biofilm communities. The project will meet the MRC strategic Interdisciplinary skills at the interface between chemistry, materials science and antimicrobial resistance, and the MRC strategic Quantitative skills in statistics, data analytics and informatics for the treatment of antimicrobial data. In physical science, the main skills to be developed are synthetic and characterisation techniques, e.g. nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, gel permeable chromatography (GPC), dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and so on. On the microbiology side, new skills to be developed include biofilm-culture, using biofilm models representative of chronic wound infection or lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients, imaging techniques e.g. confocal fluorescence analysis, statistical design of experiments to represent bacterial populations, etc.